Results for “Ed Snowden”

… Presumably, the last thing these adversary services would want would be to make this “interest” transparent to the United States. The role of concealment must be taken into account when assessing information bearing on the work of espionage services. I learned when I was interv...

L2 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS tery I was going to solve on this first trip to Hong Kong. I needed to know more about his activities before he got there. After all, Snowden was not, as he himself pointed out from Moscow, an “angel descend- ing from the heavens.” He had been w...

…6-18 15. “Miss publishing it...” —The description of the Guardian’s reaction to Greenwald’s offer of a scoop was reported by Luke Hardy, a Guardian reporter commissioned by the Guardian editor to write “the Snowden Files,” a book that Oliver Stone bought the film rights from the...

13 Nor did Snowden’s breach begin with him handing over classified documents to the Guardian reporters in Hong Kong in June 2013 or, for that matter, in the eleven days prior to his meeting with journalists in 2013. He had, as the NSA quickly determined begun illicitly copying d...

… him from taking highly-sensitive GCHQ documents referring to them. In his five weeks at this Booz Allen job, he also used this same newly-acquired “Priv Ac” at the NSA to steal files from the Israeli, Canadian and Australian intelligence services. Jumping from one outside contr...

CHAPTER 5 Crossing the Rubicon What I came to feel is that a regime that is described as a national security agency has stopped representing the public interest and has instead begun to protect and promote state security interests. —EDWARD SNOWDEN, Moscow, 2014 S OON AFTER Sno...

58 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS CryptoParty, Tor station, and other anti-NSA activities could go unremarked upon. After all, ten or so NSA workers attended the first party, and it is not unlikely that many of them recognized him as their co-worker. If so, they knew (as did San...

…erprise of stealing state secrets for reasons of conscience, but so do many spies. Such conscience-driven spies are called, in CIA parlance, “ideological agents.” For instance, the British diplomat Donald Maclean, who was one of the most important Russian spies in the Cold War, w...

…ork was in five days. My fixer, Zamir, had been trying to arrange an appointment for three weeks, but he had only received one callback from Kucher- ena’s assistant, Valentina Kvirvova. She wanted to know how I knew Oliver Stone. Zamir told her of my part in Stone’s movie. That w...

146 Snowden’s supporters, to be sure, disputed this view. If only as an act of faith in Snowden’s personal integrity, they continued to believe his avowal to Senator Humphrey that he had acted to protect U.S. secrets by shielding them from adversary intelligence services after h...

ILLUSTRATION CREDITS Edward Snowden on video shown in Hong Kong: AP Photo/Kin Cheung NSA base on Oahu: Courtesy Ena and Ines Talakic Barton Gellman: AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras in Hong Kong: AP Photo/John Minchillo Mira hotel: Courtesy Ena and...

124 In view of such past successes of the Russian intelligence services, it cannot be precluded that there was another person in the NSA working with Snowden who used an enthusiastic as cover to prevent any light from falling on his own surreptitious spying. While it may seem ex...

165 companies acted less like management consultants and more like temporary employment agencies in finding for the NSA the computer specialists, who had the necessary security clearances. Unlike intelligence services, their fate depended on turning profits. Since the value of t...

116 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS Some secret methods that Snowden made public compromised the NSA’s state-of-the-art technology of which adversaries had been unaware. For example, the NSA had devised an ingenious tech- nology in 2008 for tapping into computers abroad that had...

168 Despite all the potential flaws in it, the outsourcing system, ii seemed to work until 2013. It even featured a revolving door through which Booz Allen, for example, hired retiring executives from the intelligence services, such as ex-NSA director Michael McConnell, R. James...